The Congress of Rough Riders

by John Boyne

  My great-grandfather went to fight in a war, a lot of which was centred around one of the oldest conflicts the world had known: the issue of slavery. At the same age that he was putting on his uniform and having sleepless nights at the thought of having his head blown off at any moment, I had never set foot outside London, was still attending school each day in my uniform, and was living in a small, two-bedroom terraced house with my ageing father, who had made a pass at my sixteen-year-old girlfriend while I had been out of the room.

  It was a few weeks after Agnes had first met Isaac that I heard what had actually happened that day. We were in a coffee shop, with Adam and Justin and a girl that Adam was trying to impress, drinking cappuccinos and pretending that they were merely a symbol of the bohemian lifestyle we would shortly be living, once we left school. The girl Adam was with – I think her name was Claire – had taken umbrage at a comment Agnes had made earlier and was sulking quietly, her nose buried in her coffee cup as Adam attempted to fill the awkward moments with chatter. Eventually, the conversation turned to older men and women, and who we would be attracted to outside of our age group. Everyone named a few people but when it came to Agnes’s turn, she shrugged and said she didn’t go for anyone over twenty.

  ‘No one?’ asked Claire sarcastically as if she could read Agnes’s mind and knew that she was lying. ‘Not even … like, Richard Gere?’

  ‘Not if you paid me,’ said Agnes, maintaining her composure. ‘I don’t like it when older guys hit on me. I’m sorry, I just don’t.’

  ‘I’m three months younger than Agnes,’ I pointed out with a laugh and she gave me a cool smile in return.

  ‘Your father hit on me, you know,’ she said suddenly, out of the blue and we all stopped talking and stared at her. The smile froze on my face and I looked at her in disbelief.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did you say?’

  She looked away from me. ‘I said your father hit on me. And he’s an older guy. Way older, actually. But relax, like I said I don’t go for older guys.’

  ‘He’s very much an older guy,’ Adam pointed out.

  ‘What do you mean he hit on you?’ I spluttered, refusing to believe her and wondering why she was stating this so casually. ‘When did he … what did he do?’

  ‘That afternoon that I was around in your house,’ she said, and to her credit she looked a little shamefaced now, as if she had regretted bringing up the subject in the first place. ‘You went out of the room for a bit and—’

  ‘When? When did I?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said with a sigh. ‘You probably went upstairs to fix up your little Cowboys and Indians, I can’t remember. All I know is you went out for a couple of minutes and he came over to me and … well, he hit on me.’

  ‘What did he do?’ asked Adam, leering at her. Claire staring at her with wide eyes.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what he did. You know when someone’s hitting on you, okay?’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Claire, determined to be part of this. ‘The same thing happened to me one time with this guy who—’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said, my stomach churning inside as this information settled into my brain. ‘Are you serious or are you kidding around? If you’re kidding around, just tell me because this is … this is …’

  ‘Jesus, William, I’m sorry I brought it up,’ she said, putting her cup down dramatically on the table. ‘Forget about it, all right? Maybe I made a mistake.’

  ‘You just said you know when someone’s hitting on you!’ I shouted. ‘How could you have made a mistake?’

  ‘Hey, it’s not her fault, whatever happened,’ said Claire and all three of us shot her a stay-out-of-it look.

  ‘I can look after myself, Claire,’ said Agnes quickly. There was a tense silence for a minute or two as I tried to piece this together in my head. I was growing more and more angry inside, but I was also amazed because throughout all the years since my mother’s departure, Isaac had never displayed any interest in other women, had never brought one home to meet me, never asked one out, had slept alone every night for twelve years. In my arrogance, I had assumed that in his sixties he had put all thoughts of romance outside of his head. The idea of him showing an interest in a woman felt strange to me. The thought that it could be my girlfriend, someone forty-five years younger than himself, made me feel sick. I stood up.

  ‘I’m going home,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus, William, don’t be such a fucking drama queen,’ said Justin and I shot him an angry look.

  ‘Let him go if he wants to go,’ said Agnes, always unwilling to be the one who asked me to stay. ‘If you want to be a child about this, go right ahead. You’re only embarrassing yourself.’

  I stared at her in disbelief. ‘How is this my fault?’ I asked her angrily. ‘You’re the one who—’

  ‘I’m the one who what? If you’ve done nothing, I’ve definitely done nothing. I’m the innocent party here. So just sit down and finish your coffee and let’s get the hell out of here.’

  ‘I’ve got something I’ve got to do,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you later.’ I stormed out of the coffee shop and went across the road to the bus shelter, seething inside, willing her to come out and join me. If she cared about me at all, I thought, she’d check on me to see if I was all right. She wouldn’t let me go in such anger. In the distance I could see the double-decker bus which could take me home picking up passengers at the previous stop. The traffic was heavy and it would be another couple of minutes before it reached me. I was torn between a desire to go back inside and be with Agnes, and the need to go home and confront Isaac. Either way I had to be actively doing something and standing there, waiting for the bus to make its way slowly down the road, was driving me crazy. She never appeared so when it arrived, I got on.

  Isaac wasn’t home yet but I had already resolved in my head what I would do. I went to the shed in our back garden and found a large cardboard box and brought it upstairs and set it on the floor outside my bedroom, and then I got to work. The first thing to come down was the cowboy posters on the wall, and the large sepia photograph of Red Cloud, the leader of the Oglala Lakota, which had been staring at each other on either side of my bedroom for as long as I could remember. The tape which held them up was stiff and came away from the wall easily and I wondered how they had managed to survive this long. Taking only a moment to draw a breath of courage, I held the posters at their sides and crumpled them up into large balls, tossing them out of the room and into the centre of the cardboard box with accuracy, like basketballs into a hoop. Next I tackled the series of armies who had been chasing each other around my shelves since my childhood, never catching their prey, always hunting each other down determinedly. I took great clumps of them in my hands and carried them out of the room, throwing them away too. Members of the Fifth Cavalry, confederate soldiers, union jayhawkers all disappeared, along with the Cheyenne, the Comanche, the Arapoha, all of whom had been living in mutual harmony for the best part of sixteen years; every type and species of man which the American west had claimed as her own landed in a heap in the box, a mass grave for these little plastic warriors.

  The memorabilia came next, the toy guns, the lassoes, the wooden replica of the Deadwood stagecoach – the original of which my great-grandfather would one day take on the State of Nebraska across the ocean from New York to London – the Indian headset with feathers and band which had been one of my most treasured possessions as a child; all of them were discarded until the box was overflowing and I had to get another. My room was being stripped bare as I took each element of my childhood and my father’s obsessions and discarded them one by one. Finally I arrived at the enormous model of Fort Laramie, where three of the most important treaties between the government and the Indian people had been signed during the 1850s and 1860s, which stood on my desk. Isaac and I had built it together when I was a child and it had taken us the best part of two months to complete it. It was heavy and complicated but as
we had not taken as much care as we should have, I had always been very cautious when handling it, afraid that it would fall and break if due care and attention was not taken. Out of habit, I picked it up gingerly and carried it out of the room. I stood holding it over the box for a few moments, knowing that this was it, the final act of revenge, before letting it fall to the ground, where it crashed noisily, some pieces of it falling off and breaking. I lifted my foot and let it crash down on top of it, destroying the Fort and sending pieces of it spinning around the carpet.

  At last it was done and my room looked empty. I had never seen such space in it before and realised how few possessions I actually had which could truly be called my own. I brushed my hands against each other in order to clear off the dust and turned, intending to leave the room now and bring the boxes outside to where the bin men might collect them later, and jumped to see Isaac standing in the doorway, his frame melting even before my eyes as he stared inside the room in disbelief, wondering what had happened, what had made me take my memories and his history and simply throw them away. I stared at him and swallowed nervously, my anger of an hour earlier satisfied now and altered into a slight nervousness and embarrassment at what I had done. Isaac looked at me and shook his head sadly, his mouth opening and closing as he tried to find words. The thought of Agnes came into my mind now and I flinched, my hands tightening into fists, and without a word, without any explanation I walked slowly to the door and closed it in his pale and unhappy face.

  I would not be a child any more.

  Chapter Four

  East and West

  My great-grandfather went to live at Fort Lawrence, Kansas, the headquarters of the jayhawkers, that group of men who were organising sorties against the confederate bushwhackers of the Kansas–Missouri border and killing as many of those men in battle as they possibly could. It didn’t take long for Bill and Homer Lee to settle into life at the barracks and their experience riding for long distances at a time as part of the Pony Express saw them join a gang of scouts and spend the majority of their time galloping across the prairie lands, where my great-grandfather always felt the most at home.

  They bunked upstairs in a house run by a Mrs Theodore Adams. The lower part of the house was a small saloon and the rooms upstairs were mostly used by young jayhawkers such as them. Lawrence itself was a thriving town with several saloons, a schoolhouse, a whorehouse and a couple of grocery stores to its name, and the boys made frequent use of all except the schoolhouse during their stay there. They saw little of Jim Lane after their arrival there; once he had signed them up to his cause he had little more personal use for them and instead introduced them to Patch Bellows, the officer who dictated where the scouts should go each day. From time to time they would run into Lane in the town but on such occasions he centred his attentions on Homer, asking whether he had heard from his father recently, and more importantly whether he had written to him himself, and mostly ignored Bill, who seemed unworthy of his consideration.

  ‘We’re not seeing the fighting I expected,’ complained Bill one evening, lying back in his bunk with his arms folded behind his head. ‘All this scouting, there’s got to be more we could be doing. I want to see some action, some adventure!’

  ‘We could go out and get ourselves killed,’ suggested Homer. ‘Would that help?’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ replied Bill with a sigh. ‘I just mean that all we seem to do is ride around the prairies all day long, watching them bushwhackers from a distance and reporting back to officers who don’t seem to care much anyway. Why can’t we go down and fight a few sometime, Homer? Show them what we’re about.’

  ‘Because there’s two of us and usually twenty or thirty of them,’ replied Homer. ‘Why do you think, you damn fool? Do you want to get yourself shot to pieces, is that it? That’s not going to help much when it comes to you being the great adventurer, is it?’

  Bill said nothing for a time, and simply lay back and brooded instead. He knew Homer was right; there were certain jobs that had to be done and unfortunately for him, he was involved in doing one which did not fill him with excitement. He still enjoyed the freedom of the plains and the prairies but that freedom was curtailed by the detailed instructions that Patch Bellows gave them every morning of where they should go, who they should watch and what time they should return.

  Meanwhile, William Quantrill, the leading confederate who was Jim Lane’s sworn nemesis, was moving closer and closer towards the border with his army. After several bloody skirmishes, reinforcements had been sent from Lawrence to help out the jayhawkers closer to the river. For the time being they were holding them off, but there was trouble in store. The scent of battle was moving closer and closer towards the fort and when news came of Quantrill’s sacking of Bunkport, some twenty miles to the south of Lawrence, the air at their camp became increasingly troubled.

  ‘They took Bunkport with no more than thirty men,’ shouted Patch Bellows at a fort meeting during that week. Most of the officers and soldiers, including Bill and Homer Lee, were in attendance, listening for Jim Lane’s assessment of what had taken place, and what they should do next in order to secure their own safety. ‘And over three hundred lived there!’ he added. ‘That’s the kind of force we’ve got to be prepared for. We need to get the army to send reinforcements or we face certain death.’

  ‘What happened at Bunkport was an anomaly,’ countered Lane, and although his voice was strong and deep enough to carry above and across them, when he spoke the room tended to silence, for he was both respected and feared in equal portions. ‘Bunkport was not an army town after all. Civilians lived there, not trained soldiers. They were ill-prepared for fighting. Maybe that was our fault,’ he admitted, shrugging his shoulders slightly as though blame was not a currency he often traded in. ‘Maybe we should have sent—’

  ‘Civilians or not,’ called out Sam Greeley, interrupting the senator. ‘They were people that some of us knew. I’ve got a sister lives in Bunkport with her family. Quantrill put her out of her home and burned it to the ground. Where’s she to go now? Can you tell me that?’

  ‘Sam, I sympathise with you and your family, of course I do,’ replied Lane quickly, silencing the shouts with a raised hand and a firmness in his voice that suggested he wasn’t going to get carried away into either sentimentality or personalities. ‘But it’s like I say – they were not army folk. They didn’t know what to do when the enemy came calling. We will be prepared. I tell you that now, people. We will be prepared. And we will fight to the death if necessary.’

  True to his word, plans were quickly put in place to defend themselves for the inevitable moment when the confederates attacked Lawrence but it became something of a contradiction to have a fort of soldiers determined to push forwards and join in the war, and then order them to remain in that fort awaiting the arrival of the enemy. Bill wasn’t happy with it and was one of a group of men who petitioned Lane in private to be allowed to set forth for the border in groups. Bill’s voice as a leader had grown substantially since he had joined the jayhawkers. Although he was still younger than many of the men who had been there before him, his determination and bravery had seen him earn the respect of the other men. He had stopped telling his Indian story too and relied not on his own narratives but on his deeds to forge himself a reputation. But Lane was adamant; there were plans to be made, he insisted. They would be ready for Quantrill when he came.

  In late August, 1863, Bill and Homer Lee, along with four or five other men were riding slowly along the mountains near Lawrence, another quiet day of uneventful scouting coming to an end. The sun was drifting slowly down behind them and they were ready to begin their move back to the fort, but broke first for a rest and some water and to allow the horses some time to regain their strength. They lay down on the mountain top, leaning against the rocks for support, some with their eyes closed and their hats pulled down over their faces and talked for a change of things other than war and killing. One of the men had a sw
eetheart at the fort and he planned to ask her to marry him. His name was Angel Law and his father had been sheriff at Bunkport, the town which had recently fallen to the confederate bushwhackers. Both Law’s father and mother had been killed that day, along with his sister Elsie, and he had been deeply bitter and upset for some time; his sweetheart had kept close to him during the worst moments and he felt ready to propose now, seeking some kind of return to the family life which had been stolen from him. The other men teased him gently over his romance, but envied him at the same time for his intended was a well-liked girl, and they were happy for him. Had it been any other man, lewd comments might have been made about the speed with which Angel wanted the marriage to take place, but circumstances being what they were, this was avoided.

  ‘I think I’m going to take her away from Lawrence,’ said Angel quietly, taking a sip from his water bottle as he looked off into the distance, away from where the fort lay and in a different direction to Bunkport as well; he looked towards a place he had never been before, somewhere out beyond the horizon.

  ‘You’re leaving the jayhawkers?’ asked Homer Lee, surprised, for it was a rare man that ever did that. It was generally thought that there were only three ways out: the war could end, you could desert, or you could be killed. The first seemed impossible, the second unthinkable and the third was an option they didn’t like to consider at all.

  ‘Might do,’ replied Angel. ‘I’ve been speaking to Senator Lane about it. He said I could do worse than become a sheriff myself. Like my father,’ he added, his voice a shade quieter. The men nodded sagely and looked at the ground in silence for a moment. ‘He knows a few towns up north that are looking for men,’ he continued after a respectful pause. ‘Said he’d put in a good word for me. I think Candice might go for it, don’t you reckon?’